Abstract

[Extract] While modern agricultural technology was developed with the noble intention of feeding the ever growing world population and has proven efficient in some parts of the world, until now it has failed - at the same time - to provide food security in many parts of the world. Modern agricultural methods have brought spectacular increases in productivity over the past 40 years; there has been remarkable growth in agricultural production with per capita world food production growing by 17 per cent and aggregate world food production growing by 145 per cent (FAO, 2005). On the other hand, more than 1 billion people (around one-sixth of the world population) are undernourished, 98 per cent of them from developing countries (FAO, 2010). Schmidhuber and Tubiello (2007) stated that the crucial issue of food security is not whether food is 'available' but whether the monetary and non-monetary resources at the disposal of the population are sufficient to allow everyone access to adequate quantities of food. 'National sufficiency is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee food security at individual level. For example, Hong Kong and Singapore are not self sufficient (agriculture is non-existent) but their populations are food secure' (Schmidhuber and Tubiello, 2007: 19703), whereas India as a country is self-sufficient in food production but home to 231 million food­ insecure people. Evans (2009) argued that the benefits of modern technology have been unequally distributed, with large farms reaping the major benefits and leaving the majority of small farms untouched. This highlights the fact that modern technologies could not entirely address the issues faced by small farms in developing countries.